Keisha Holloway did not plan to open a cannabis dispensary. She planned to be a nurse. Then her brother spent three years in an Illinois state prison for cannabis possession — three years in which she worked two jobs, raised her nephew, and watched a mostly white group of investors line up for the cannabis licenses her state had just started issuing to people who looked nothing like her family.
“I got angry,” she said. “And then I got strategic.”
Today, Holloway runs a dispensary on Chicago’s West Side that she describes as a community anchor, not just a retail store. She employs 14 people from the neighborhood, donates 5% of profits to an expungement fund, and runs a monthly financial literacy workshop in the back room. She is also, still, one of very few Black women who own a majority stake in a equity licensing delays program for people like her.
The Ownership Gap
The numbers are stark. A 2025 Marijuana Business Daily survey found that Black people own majority stakes in approximately 4.3% of cannabis businesses nationally — a figure that has barely moved since the first recreational markets opened in 2012. Women own majority stakes in approximately 17% of businesses, a figure that sounds more encouraging until measured against women’s share of small business ownership generally (42%) and the industry’s early rhetoric about building something more equitable than the industries that came before.
Black women, at the intersection of both gaps, face compounding barriers: less access to the professional networks where cannabis deals are made, less access to capital in an industry where banking is inaccessible, and licensing and compliance costs that function as filters favoring established wealth.
The irony is historically piercing. Black Americans were arrested for cannabis possession at 3.73 times the rate of white Americans nationwide between 2010 and 2018, according to ACLU data. In some states, the disparity was even higher. The communities most harmed by prohibition have the least ownership in the legal market that replaced it.
Building Anyway
What is remarkable, given these conditions, is how many Black women are building cannabis businesses anyway — through creative financing, coalition-building, and an intimate understanding of their customer base that gives them competitive advantages capital cannot buy.
In Michigan, Ora Buffington launched a cannabis delivery service in 2022 focused on Detroit’s medical market, bootstrapped with personal savings and a small grant from the city’s equity program. By 2025, she had converted to recreational delivery and was generating enough revenue to hire a compliance manager and expand to two additional delivery zones. She has declined acquisition offers, choosing to maintain ownership and the flexibility to hire from her community.
In California, a group of six Black women from the Bay Area pooled their capital into a collective to obtain a cultivation license — a structure that allowed them to share the significant upfront costs of facility buildout and licensing fees. The collective model, she says, is underutilized: “We couldn’t do it alone. But together, we could do it.”
The Cultural Work
Beyond business ownership, Black women are shaping cannabis culture in ways that extend beyond the balance sheet. Cannabis creatives, educators, advocates, and influencers — a population disproportionately Black and female — are building the aesthetic, social, and normative frameworks through which millions of people first encounter legal cannabis.
The “wellness cannabis” movement — a framing that emphasizes cannabis as self-care, stress relief, and ritual rather than recreation — has been substantially built by Black women content creators, writers, and educators who brought the plant into the vocabulary of health and balance rather than escapism.
Smoke & Mirrors, a Chicago-based collective of Black women cannabis educators, runs workshops on responsible consumption, cannabis and mental health, and “canna-cooking” that draw sold-out crowds in community spaces. The collective has no dispensary license and no commercial cannabis products. It has, nonetheless, helped thousands of people develop a relationship with cannabis that is thoughtful and intentional rather than reactive.
“We’re defining what this culture looks like,” said the collective’s co-founder. “That doesn’t require a license. It requires showing up.”
The Policy Ask
Advocates for equity in cannabis ownership are pushing for structural interventions at the state level: automatic license priority for individuals with prior cannabis convictions, capitalization funds with meaningful funding levels, municipal approval process reform, and technical assistance programs that go beyond a brochure.
They are also pushing for data transparency — requiring states to track and publicly report ownership demographics across all license types, so that equity claims can be measured against outcomes rather than intentions.
Holloway, back in Chicago, doesn’t wait for policy to catch up to her ambitions. She’s applying for a second location. She’s started mentoring other equity applicants through the process. And she’s still angry — but strategically so.
“They built this industry from scratch,” she said, gesturing broadly at the mainstream cannabis establishment. “We can build something from scratch too. We’ve always had to. That’s the advantage they don’t understand they gave us.”
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